In the early 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan launched a covert war to destroy the fledgling Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. It was brutal: Paramilitary war, CIA attacks, economic blockade, and more.
It would wreak havoc on the country, killing tens of thousands and ravaging the economy. But an international solidarity movement stood up in response. And the Reagan government’s hubris, and drive to fuel its war on Nicaragua, would break U.S. laws and lead to a shocking scandal in Washington: Iran Contra.
In this episode, host Michael Fox walks back into the 1980s, to the U.S. response to revolution in Nicaragua and to the international solidarity that pushed back.
This is Part 2 of Episode 10.
Under the Shadow is an investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time, telling the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.
In each episode, host Michael Fox takes us to a location where something historic happened — a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place he takes us was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.
Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox.
This podcast is produced in partnership between The Real News Network and NACLA.
Guests:
Edited by Heather Gies.
Sound design by Gustavo Türck.
Theme music by Monte Perdido and Michael Fox.
Permanent links
Follow and support journalist Michael Fox or Under the Shadow at https://www.patreon.com/mfox. You can also see pictures and listen to full clips of Michael Fox’s music for this episode.
Additional links/info
Monte Perdido’s new album Ofrenda is now out. You can listen to the full album on Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you listen to music.
Other music from Blue Dot Sessions.
For declassified documents on the U.S. Contra war on Nicaragua and the Iran Contra affair, you can visit Peter Kornbluh’s National Security Archives here and here.
Brian Wilson’s memoir, Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson, is available here. His interview on Democracy Now! is here.
Eline van Ommen’s book, Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2023), is available here.
William Robinson’s book, A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention In The Nicaraguan Elections And American Foreign Policy In The Post-cold War Era about the U.S. role in Nicaragua’s 1990 election is available here.
For the 2007 documentary American Sandinista, you can visit the website of director Jason Blalock. jasonblalock.com
Here are links to the 1980 documentaries about Nicaragua’s literacy campaign that I mentioned in part 1: La Salida and La Llegada.
For a deeper analysis of opposing views on role of the U.S. government today in Nicaragua I recommend the following resources:
This pair of NACLA articles from professor William Robinson, offers an opposing view, underscoring that “Washington’s principal concern in Nicaragua is not getting rid of Ortega but preserving the interests of transnational capital.”
Transcript
Michael Fox: Hi, I’m your host, Michael Fox.
First, before we get started, let me say that today is the continuation of Episode 10, about the Nicaraguan Revolution. If you haven’t heard the first part, I recommend you go back and listen to that now.
Also, many portions of today’s episode deal with harsh themes from the US war on Nicaragua in the 1980s, including killings, war, and terror attacks. If you are sensitive to these things or you’re in the room with small children, you might want to consider another time to listen.
OK. Here’s the show…
I’m standing on the shore of this old fisherman’s village on the Pacific Ocean in northwestern Nicaragua. In the evening time and the early morning, these guys roll the boats in and out using these big, long wooden rods that help get them on shore. It’s a dark sand, volcanic. The waves are breaking. There’s about a dozen surfers out in the water — Many of them are from Brazil and the US, actually, folks that came here years ago, fell in love with the surf here, bought homes, and decided to stay.
There’s a little hostel on the beach right behind me. Also behind me is this little palapa where a woman sells fish and beers and food on the beach. But other than that, it’s not developed. It’s dirt roads. But really nice. Really nice.
The place it’s called Miramar here, and it’s just a couple miles from Puerto Sandino — Of course, Sandino, Augusto Sandino, he was the freedom fighter who led the fight against the US Marines when Nicaragua was occupied in the 1910s and ‘20s.
And the reason I’m here is not for the nice break or the ocean, which is beautiful, but because this spot, this port, Puerto Sandino, was the site of major, major pushback by the United States during the 1980s.
Remember, just a few years before, the Sandinista insurgency had overthrown a brutal US-backed dictator. But amid the Cold War crusade against the supposed threat of communism in Central America, the United States set out to do all it could to destabilize the new government. The US government trained counter-revolutionaries, launched economic sanctions, imposed an embargo, and…
The CIA and the US government was openly attacking ports up and down the Pacific and the Caribbean side of Nicaragua. And this one got mine attacked several times, including the refinery, which is just a couple miles down the road from here.
That was in the fall of 1983. The CIA-trained commandos then supervised raids from speedboats targeting major Nicaraguan ports as part of the strategy to undermine the Sandinista government. They damaged port facilities. In Puerto Sandino, they also attacked oil and pipeline operations.
A White House official confirmed that CIA agents supervised the attack. “Let’s make the bastards sweat,” CIA director, William Casey, reportedly told his chief of operations for Latin America about the sabotage campaign.
Early the next year, 1984, the CIA began laying underwater mines at Nicaraguan ports. In the following months, at least eight ships from numerous countries were damaged by the mines, including a Soviet freighter and a Dutch dredger.
The actions caused an uproar, both in Nicaragua and abroad.
News Report: While the mining of Nicaraguan harbors has caused a huge political furor in the United States, anti-Sandinista guerrilla sources here in Costa Rica feel vindicated because of the tactical effectiveness of the mining.
Alex Aviña: This wasn’t a new strategy. If we think about what the United States government did to Chile under Allende and that infamous quote from Nixon where he talks about making the economy scream, that was one of the strategies that the Reagan administration used against Nicaragua.
Michael Fox: That is Alex Aviña.
Alex Aviña: I am an associate professor of history at Arizona State University.
Michael Fox: We heard from him in the first part of this episode. He’s an expert on this period of US intervention in Central America and, in particular, Nicaragua in the 1980s.
Alex Aviña: So by mining the ports, by controlling and preventing economic activity from flowing in or flowing out of the country, Nicaraguans knew pretty early on that there was some sort of covert economic war and an actual overt war at the borders happening. And they knew who was waging it.
Michael Fox: The attacks on Nicaragua’s ports were just the tip of the iceberg.
News Report 2: The Reagan administration has spent over $80 million funding the Contras guerrilla attacks inside Nicaragua. The questions center on who the Contras are targeting. It has become, some say, a Dirty War.
Speaker: The tactics are what we call terrorist tactics. They are not military tactics.
Michael Fox: That, and so much more, in a minute.
[Under the Shadow theme music]
This is Under the Shadow — An investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.
This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.
I’m your host, Michael Fox — Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcast Brazil on Fire. I’ve spent the better part of the last twenty years in Latin America.
I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years.
In each episode in this series, I will take you to a location where something historic happened — A landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place I’m going to bring you was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world. I’ll try to discover what lingers of that history today.
So, in the first part of this episode, we looked at the Sandinista revolution against dictator Anastasio Somoza and the rollout of US plans to destabilize the new government. In this Part 2, we dive deep into the CIA’s Contra war on Nicaragua, the economic embargo, and the Iran-Contra scandal. But also, the international solidarity movement that stood up in response.
This is Under the Shadow Season 1: Central America. Episode 10 Part 2: “Nicaragua, 1980s. Contra War”.
So, while the CIA is mining ports, the Contras are wreaking havoc on the countryside. Those were the counter-revolutionaries, armed and trained in Honduras, and sent to destabilize the Sandinista government.
We talked about the Contras’ war on Nicaragua and their terror campaign on the civilian population in the first part of this episode. It had a tremendous toll on the country. They killed thousands of innocent people; they destroyed crops and industrial production; they forced the Sandinista government to divert as much as 50% of its national budget to fighting the war.
That meant less money for social programs, health and education, food production, and the promises of the revolution.
William Robinson is a professor of sociology and Latin American Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He lived in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. We heard from him often in the first part of this episode.
William Robinson: There’s a rapid militarization of the whole country. You now see the army and the young kids in their military uniforms. Everyone had their AK-47 and their militia training. But you now see this incredible militarization, and it undermines the ability of the revolution to transform things.
Their strategy was to grind down the economy to make it impossible for the revolution to improve people’s lives, and to eventually force the population to turn its back on the revolution just in the name of survival. So that was a war of attrition.
The term that was thrown around by US strategists, military and political strategists back then, was low-intensity warfare. It’s been called quite a number of things over in recent decades, but that was what they called it then, and what we called it. It was the war of attrition, and it was very successful.
Michael Fox: The Sandinista government instituted a draft to more effectively combat the US-backed Contras. It was not popular.
William Robinson: What that meant is that a significant portion of the population, which wasn’t totally gung ho Sandinista but wasn’t counter-revolutionary, either threw their bag in not necessarily with the counter-revolution but against the Sandinistas, or sent their kids abroad. And that also helped to undermine the social base of the revolution.
Michael Fox: Meanwhile, the United States was also unleashing a campaign of psychological warfare on the Nicaraguan people, spreading fear, tension, and terror.
William Robinson: There’s this spy plane. It actually doesn’t drop bombs. It goes way too high in the sky. You can’t see it, and it breaks the sound barrier. So for about a month straight, they would fly overhead every day. And maybe they were taking photographs, but we analyzed at the time, those of us that were analysts of US strategy, that they wanted the whole population to be in a permanent state of tension and anxiety.
I’m going to tell you my son was born on Sept. 2, 1984, and these overhead flights started shortly afterwards. And we were about to send him to be raised by his grandmother, who was living in Mexico, because we thought any day there would be an invasion.
Michael Fox: Keep in mind that was about a year after the US invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983 as that country’s revolution imploded.
William Robinson: The point here is we lived round the clock with this tension, this fear and this tension. And that was part of the psychological warfare.
Michael Fox: But, if the Reagan government was doing all it could to undermine the Sandinista revolution, there was also an international grassroots movement standing up for Nicaragua and pushing back on the United States. Nicaragua was an inspiration around the world.
Like I mentioned in the last episode, in 1979, the Sandinistas rid the country of a four-decade-long dictatorship. They rolled out literacy, vaccination, and health campaigns. They built roads and sugar mills, and created a Ministry of Culture with the goal of democratizing art. Poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal led the effort.
Solidarity activists from the United States supported the revolution at home and abroad. Thousands visited the country on tours of solidarity with the revolution or brigades that helped harvest crops on state-run and cooperative farms. NACLA itself, which co-produces this podcast series, led several delegations throughout the 1980s.
Alex Cox was among those who visited the country on a solidarity tour.
Announcer: A film by Alex Cox.
Michael Fox: He’s the British film director who would later go on to make the movie, Walker, about the US filibuster who invaded and took over Nicaragua in the mid-1800s.
Announcer: Walker.
Speaker 2: It is the God-given right of the American people to dominate the Western Hemisphere.
Michael Fox: We looked at that in depth in Episode 8.
Alex Cox: You go and travel around, and you see the farm cooperatives, and you meet the representatives of the political parties, etcetera. So we went on one of those trips and it was very interesting. I really enjoyed it.
Michael Fox: He was there during the November 1984 general election, which saw Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega win a landslide victory with more than two-thirds of the vote. Turnout was over 75%. The Sandinistas hoped a clear electoral victory, with the participation of hundreds of international observers, would encourage the United States to set aside its war on the country.
Alex Cox: It was tremendously positive and very enthusiastic. The vast majority of the people whom I met supported the revolution and supported the Sandinistas. And then over the four years that I was there, going back and forth, it did change, because the Contra war enacted such a heavy toll, that everybody had a family member who had been killed or impacted or forced to leave their farm because of the American-financed terrorism of the Contras.
Michael Fox: Historian Alex Aviña.
Alex Aviña: There’s a huge anti-Reagan Sandinista march in Managua, I think it must be from ‘83 or ‘84. And I remember seeing a documentary about this, and there’s a banner at the forefront of this march where it says “Reagan, son of a bitch”. And I think that’s how we can think about Ronald Reagan and what he did not just in Nicaragua, but Central America.
This is one of the darkest, if not the darkest, period of Latin American history when it comes to genocide, political violence, and just mass death. And Ronald Reagan was behind a lot of it.
Michael Fox: People in the United States knew it and responded.
Alex Aviña: On the grassroots side, you have the emergence of the Sanctuary Movement that emerges not too far from me here in Phoenix in Tucson, with a Presbyterian minister in a church that starts to create an underground railroad for Central American refugees who are fleeing the violence that the US is generating in their home country. And you have hundreds of thousands of Americans who are marching on the streets and become part of the Central American solidarity movement.
Michael Fox: As many as 80,000 people in the United States signed a Pledge of Resistance, promising to commit civil disobedience if the US invaded Nicaragua.
And people were already putting their bodies on the line against the US support for the Contras. There were hunger strikes. Others blocked weapons shipments. Many went to jail. Vietnam Veteran Brian Wilson lost both legs while participating in a non-violent protest on the railroad tracks outside of a US weapons depot in California — The train ran him over.
Brian Wilson [recording]: We found out later that the train crew that day had been ordered not to stop the train, which was an unprecedented… Basically an illegal order.
Michael Fox: That’s him speaking to Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! in 2011 after the release of his memoir, Blood on the Tracks.
Brian Wilson [recording]: This is what happens to people, of course, all over the world who obstruct the Yankee mad train that’s trying to repress people who wanna have self-determination or what have you. It was just another part of the US policy coming home very personally to me, viscerally.
The day I woke up, 9,000 people showed up at the tracks and ripped up 300 feet of the tracks, and stacked up the railroad ties in a very interesting sculpture. And from that day on for 28 consecutive months, there was a permanent occupation on the tracks of sometimes 200 people with tents, blocking every train and every truck. 2,100 people were arrested. 3 people had their arms broken by the police.
Jesse Jackson [recording]: We must have peace in Central America…
Michael Fox: Eline van Ommen is a historian at the University of Leeds. She says it is hard to underscore just how big the solidarity movement grew to be in the United States, how important it was for Nicaragua — And vice versa.
Eline van Ommen: It’s easy to forget because you haven’t lived it, but I think it was very, very present. In local council meetings, there were debates about things like the Sandinista Revolution and United States foreign policy. This was something that student unions talked about. There were posters everywhere. More left-leaning city councils established relationships with Nicaraguan towns. It was kind of an alternative foreign policy route.
Michael Fox: Some of the people who traveled to Nicaragua also put their lives on the line.
Alex Aviña: Often, other Americans would go down there and serve as human shields to protect. They thought that if you have foreigners on the border areas that the Contras wouldn’t attack the population, the Nicaraguense population there, because foreigners were around.
Michael Fox: But the Contras did not hold back.
Ben Linder: The electricity is coming out of here, out of the powerhouse, up to the transformers on the pole, and going into the 10 kilometers of distribution line.
Michael Fox: That’s the voice of 27-year-old US engineer Ben Linder. He was in Nicaragua as a volunteer helping to build a small hydroelectric dam to provide electricity for a poor community in the countryside.
But on April 28, 1987, Ben Linder was killed alongside two Nicaraguans in a Contra ambush.
The 2007 documentary American Sandinista looks back at the US citizens who came to Nicaragua in the 1980s to support the revolution, including Ben.
“Ben was seated with his notebook,” says one eye-witness in the documentary. “and it was at that moment that a hand grenade took his life.”
“It was something that we never understood – why they killed him,” said Hilda Granados, a friend of Linder’s, who worked with him on the hydroelectric project. “Of course, it was people from our country. But they were sent and supported by the United States. And they never understood what he was trying to do here for us, for the Nicaraguans.”
The following year, the Contras shot and wounded New York Rev. Lucius Walker during a terror attack on civilians. Rev. Walker was in Nicaragua leading a religious study delegation.
I knew Rev. Walker. He was an incredible man. He passed away in 2010, but he spoke about the attack on his life in Nicaragua in the late 1990s on a local New York TV network.
Rev. Lucius Walker [recording]: Two people in that boat attack were killed, 29 were wounded, and I was able to see, firsthand, an example of terrorism promoted, organized, paid for, directed by my own government.
And as I lay on the boat, wounded from that gunshot wound, I realized that the bullet, which came within 4 inches of shattering my spine, was paid for by my own tax money. And it shaped in me a resolve to not simply acquiesce and go away quietly but to renew our efforts to fight against the foreign policy of our own government that would kill innocent civilians.
Michael Fox: Rev. Walker responded to that moment by founding Pastors for Peace. Over the last 35 years, the group has carried thousands of tons of aid to countries like Nicaragua, Cuba, and elsewhere that face punishing US policies and crippling economic sanctions.
Meanwhile, as the United States was attacking Nicaragua, other countries were standing up — Including Cuba and the Soviet Union, which strengthened their ties with the Sandinista government in the face of US aggression.
Throughout the 1980s, the Sandinista government was clear that all these ties of solidarity were an important lifeline, particularly as the war dragged on and the financial crisis deepened. This is the essence of Eline Van Ommen’s 2023 book, Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War.
Eline van Ommen: I argue that the Sandinistas used revolutionary diplomacy and transnational connections as a means to keep the revolution alive and make sure it survived in the face of the international aggression, but also, obviously, the domestic discontent that was growing.
Michael Fox: She says the Sandinista government not only built international connections at the grassroots level, but also cultivated ties with leaders around the world, and, in particular, in Europe. There, she says, political leaders were concerned with the spread of communism, but they feared that Reagan’s war on Central America could have disastrous consequences, not just for Central America, but across the planet.
The name of Eline’s book, Nicaragua Must Survive, is actually a nod to a creative international response from the Sandinistas to US aggression.
Eline van Ommen: In 1985, there was this Nicaraguan campaign called Nicaragua Must Survive. That was one of the biggest transnational fundraising campaigns of the FSLN that they organized, basically, to keep their economy going in the aftermath of the US embargo, and basically to prevent the country from collapsing.
Michael Fox: The US embargo.
If the Contra war and the CIA actions weren’t bad enough, on the heels of the Sandinistas’ 1984 electoral victory, the US government decides to turn up the heat even more.
President Ronald Reagan [recording]: Our diplomatic objectives will not be obtained by good will and noble aspirations alone.
Michael Fox: On May 1, 1985, Reagan declares Nicaragua a “threat to national security” and imposes a trade embargo, or blockade, on the country. The measure bans all imports and exports to and from Nicaragua and prohibits Nicaraguan planes and boats from entering US ports.
The United States had long been a top trading partner of Nicaragua. Despite Sandinista efforts to increase trade with other countries, the embargo still hit hard, costing an estimated $50 million a year.
Spare parts for US manufactured goods became virtually impossible to acquire. In other words, when something broke down, it was hard to fix it. Factories stood idle while waiting for replacement parts. Similar US trade embargos have long caused suffering, most famously in Cuba and more recently in Venezuela, where I’ve reported on the impacts firsthand. The tactics haven’t changed. Nor have the goals.
In Nicaragua, in the years after the start of the embargo, the economy shudders. Inflation soars. The blockade, coupled with the war, wreaks havoc on the economy.
“We’re waiting in line. There are no products,” one middle-aged woman tells the camera in a documentary from the late 1980s. “We’re dying of hunger and our money is worthless. It’s all worthless,” she says.
“Our land is so fertile here, we should not be going hungry,” says a man.
“But in the United States, they send dollars so we kill each other,” responds an elderly woman, “and then they take everything we have.”
William Robinson.
William Robinson: You have to understand how difficult it was just to get eggs. Shortages of everything, shortages of toilet paper. There were shortages of all the basic foodstuffs. Half of your day was struggling in the streets to figure out how you’re going to get food that night. If you ran out of gas, you can’t just run down to the store and get your gas tank filled up. You had to spend a day or two days negotiating and figuring out how you’re going to even get some more propane gas.
Michael Fox: Meanwhile, in the United States, this was happening…
Congressman [recording]: We hold these hearings because in the course of the conduct of the nation’s business, something went wrong. Seriously wrong.
Michael Fox: That in a minute.
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Also, if you’re enjoying Under the Shadow, then you will definitely want to follow NACLA, the North American Congress on Latin America. NACLA’s reporting and analysis goes beyond the headlines to help you understand what’s happening in Latin America and the Caribbean from a progressive perspective. Visit nacla.org to learn more.
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Michael Fox: Iran-Contra. At the time, it was the biggest scandal to hit the US presidency since Richard Nixon’s Watergate the decade before. And I want to walk through it all, because it’s complicated, but it’s also so important.
Peter Kornbluh is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive.
Peter Kornbluh: I really do think of us as forensic historians exhuming the buried secrets of state.
Michael Fox: The archive has done tremendous work on Iran-Contra since the late ‘80s. It has a treasure trove of declassified documents. Many are shocking. They paint a clear, uncensored picture of the scandal and the US terror campaign in the region. National Security Archive staff have produced a number of books on the topic, one which Peter co-edited. I’ll include the links to them in the show notes.
Peter Kornbluh: You had an obsession with overthrowing the Sandinista government, rolling back the Nicaraguan revolution, that led directly to the Iran-Contra scandal, which was, at the time — And people have forgotten this — The most significant constitutional crisis for the US government.
The Reagan administration had violated the basic sacrosanct foundation of the separation of powers, the power of the purse. Congress constitutionally controlled the power of the purse, the Reagan administration basically circumvented that, lied about it, and decided to fund its own foreign policy operations without Congress’s authority. Indeed, going around Congress’s denial of authority for that covert paramilitary war to continue.
Michael Fox: Remember that in 1983 and 1985, the US Congress explicitly prohibited the Reagan administration from providing financial support to the Contras.
They did it anyway. Here’s how it went:
In 1985, top officials in the Reagan administration began secretly selling weapons to Iran, routed through Israel. It was illegal — The US government had imposed an arms embargo against Iran and designated the country a State Sponsor of Terrorism. Iran was desperate for weapons because it was at war with Iraq. The White House justified the arms shipments as part of an operation to free seven US hostages being held in Lebanon by Hezbollah, a militant group with ties to Iran.
Alex Aviña.
Alex Aviña: What are they doing with the money that they’re making off these arms sales? Well they’re funneling that money to pay for the Contras because officially the US government and the Reagan administration and his National Security Council, the White House, could not give money to the Contras. So they’re using these illicit economic gains from having sold weapons and missiles to the Iranians and transferring that to the Contras.
They’re also hitting up the Sultan of Brunei, they’re hitting up this worldwide anti-communist network to also give them money so they can continue financing the Contras, to continue financing the atrocities that they’re committing in quotidian fashion in Nicaragua.
Michael Fox: Oct. 5, 1986. The Sandinista government shoots down a US cargo plane carrying weapons to the Contras. Former US marine Eugene Hasenfus is the sole survivor. He’s captured and interviewed by a US reporter.
Eugene Hasenfus [recording]: I feel I’m a prisoner of politics right now. Our government is doing so many things, and this government is fighting back, and I’m a boat in between, stuck in the waves…
News Report 3: Hasenfus has admitted the plane he parachuted from carried military supplies to rebels trying to overthrow the government here. He said pilot William Cooper, who died in the crash, talked of high-level sponsors.
Eugene Hasenfus [recording]: When an individual comes across and says this is coming out of the main room.
Interviewer [recording]: That was said?
Eugene Hasenfus [recording]: That was said.
Interviewer [recording]: What did that mean to you?
Eugene Hasenfus [recording]: Well, it’s coming right out of the White House.
Michael Fox: Hasenfus was tried and sentenced to prison in Nicaragua for terrorism, though he was pardoned and released a month later.
Meanwhile, a Lebanese magazine fully breaks the Iran-Contra story, following a leak by a senior official of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
Alex Aviña: That blows up by ‘85, ‘86 in the form of what now we remember as the Iran-Contra Scandal, which then leads to this infamous TV appearance by Ronald Reagan in which he lies to the American people. To this day I tell my students the fact that he wasn’t impeached for this, it’s quite amazing that it did not happen.
President Ronald Reagan [recording]: The charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, that the United States undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists. Those charges are utterly false.
Michael Fox: That was Nov. 13, 1986. Reagan’s approval rating tanks 20 points.
Five months later, he backpedals, saying he still believes nothing was done wrong, but that the facts show differently. In May 1987, the Iran-Contra hearings begin on Capitol Hill.
Speaker 3: These hearings this morning and for the days to follow will examine what happens when the trust, which is the lubricant of our system, is breached by high officials of our government…
Michael Fox: The hearings last until August — All summer long. And they were a big thing. I was 10 at the time, living on the outskirts of Washington, DC, but I remember them. I had a family member who studied law, and he came in to attend the trial. CNN covered it around the clock, and it was the top story many nights in the evening news.
Speaker 4: Colonel North, please rise.
Michael Fox: Much of the congressional proceedings focused on one man — Colonel Oliver, or Ollie, North. That’s him being sworn in at the hearings. He wears a green military uniform with medals on his left chest. He’s clean shaven. Short hair parted on the side. He’s a Vietnam Vet and a US National Security Council staff member.
He was the guy who basically ran the Iran-Contra operation out of the White House. And as I mentioned in the first episode of this podcast, he was also the guy that my civics teacher wanted to bring in to our class in the early 1990s. North was found to have shredded or hid important documents, but…
Alex Aviña: When he has to testify before Congress, he was like the star of the show. He was great at deflecting, at lying, at presenting to himself as a true believer without saying that he engaged in criminal activity. He pretty much said that we’re right and we were using this for a noble cause, which is an amorphously defined freedom or democracy.
Michael Fox: Journalist Bill Moyers would later interview Sen. John Kerry, then a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for an expose on the scandal.
Sen. John Kerry [recording]: They were willing to literally put the Constitution at risk because they believed, somehow, there was a higher order of things, that the ends do, in fact, justify, are justified by, the means.
Michael Fox: Criminal trials dragged on against Oliver North and roughly a dozen other top officials in the Reagan administration, including National Security Advisors and members of the CIA and military. As we will see a little later, their outcomes would be a sign of, as independent counsel Lawrence Walsh put it: “How powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office without consequences.”
Meanwhile, in Nicaragua, the war, the inflation, and the economic misery continued.
Marvin Ortega Rodriguez: The war was brutal —
Michael Fox: — Says Marvin Ortega Rodriguez, a member of the Sandinistas who would go on to serve as Nicaraguan ambassador to Brazil and Panama.
Marvin Ortega Rodgriguez: Between 1961 and 1979 it is estimated that approximately 60,000 people may have died in combat [fighting to overthrow Somoza]. And between 1980 and 1990, another 60,000 fell.
Every day you had more deaths. A daily, violent bloodletting. When you go to cemeteries, there are whole areas with graves painted red and black, Sandinista colors. So many kids fell fighting. And many people began to migrate to the United States. It’s estimated that 240,000 people arrived in the US at that time. We have traditionally low migration to the United States. At that time, it grew.
Michael Fox: Meanwhile, the United States rolled out a new form of foreign intervention.
William Robinson did some of the first reporting on this in the early ‘90s.
William Robinson: The 1990 elections are approaching. The US massively begins internal political intervention in a new way. Spends millions of dollars. I think the figure I put in my 1992 book, A Faustian Bargain, is a total of $25 million. For a small country, that’s incredible. Funding all of this political opposition, which is going to organize and unite around a single slate, single candidate, for the 1990 elections.
So this new form of political intervention where you finance and organize trade unions, student groups, peasant groups, civic groups, political parties, and then unite them all in a united front, that was inaugurated, that strategy, in Nicaragua. And then, of course, throughout the 1990s, and again right up ‘till today. That’s a strategy used around the world now.
Michael Fox: Much of that funding came through the National Endowment for Democracy, or NED, which was founded in 1983 to essentially do openly what the CIA used to do covertly.
William Robinson: But it’s not just limited to the NED. There was all kinds of political funding. The NED was the spearhead. And then, of course, the covert CIA political funding also continued.
Michael Fox: William Robinson says the 1990 election was technically free and fair, but in reality, the vote was held under a gun.
William Robinson: The United States placed a gun to the head of the Nicaraguan people and said, well, now you see what we have done throughout the 1980s. We’ve destroyed your lives. We’ve shattered your hopes. We’ve made it impossible for any meaningful transformation in favor of you poor majority. And now if you want any respite, you are going to vote for this opposition that we’ve cobbled together.
Michael Fox: For Alex Aviña, there was no mistaking the message from Washington in the lead-up to the elections.
Alex Aviña: By the time we get to the elections in 1990, the US and the people they kept sending down to Nicaragua were very clear: Either, do you guys want more war? Vote for the Sandinistas; Do you want the end of war? Vote for Violeta Chamorro. And people were like… Tens of thousands of people had died in the Contra War. People were tired of war.
The surprising thing is the FSLN lost the election, but they accepted the loss, so it went against this 10 years of propaganda that the Reagan administration and then George H.W. Bush had launched against the Sandinistas.
Michael Fox: Opposition candidate Violeta Chamorro defeats president Daniel Ortega with almost 55% of the vote.
It was a crushing defeat for Sandinismo, but also a victory for Nicaraguan democracy. It was the first time the government passed from one president to another peacefully through elections.
The Sandinistas were also clear that the United States was not the only one to blame for their electoral loss.
Marvin Ortega Rodriguez: At a conference at the University of Caracas, Tomás Borge, one of the historic leaders of the FSLN, was asked what led to Sandinismo’s electoral defeat. And he said, “We lost humility. We lost our modesty. We got cocky. We felt powerful, and we isolated ourselves from the people.”
Michael Fox: William Robinson.
William Robinson: The FSLN and the Sandinistas also made a lot of mistakes. We cannot glorify everything. Real human beings in struggle, real mistakes made, real abuses of power. The thing about the US counter-revolutionary strategy was that it was very intelligent in the sense that it knew how to exploit the mistakes made by the Sandinistas and how to coax them to make more and more mistakes. I didn’t want to leave that out of the story here. One, because it has to be told, but secondly because then those mistakes become part of the US strategy.
Michael Fox: One of those mistakes happened early on, in Miskito Indigenous communities along the Caribbean coast. In December 1981, the Sandinista government resettled thousands of community members far from their homes. It was one example of a national revolutionary project that did not factor in Indigenous autonomy. And it fueled an ongoing latent historical conflict in Nicaragua that would broil between the government and these communities and, more specifically, the region’s two main Indigenous resistance organizations.
The United States took advantage. A 1986 report from US solidarity groups wrote that “from time to time, both received support from the US government’s ‘covert’ war on Nicaragua.” Some members of the communities joined the ranks of the Contras.
The Sandinista government tried to make things right in the end. It began peace negotiations. In 1987, the Nicaraguan legislature approved autonomy for the Miskito people and their region, including the right to their traditional lands. Communities that had been resettled were allowed to return home.
President George H.W. Bush [recording]: Given the clear mandate for peace and democracy, there is no reason at all for further military activity from any quarter…
Michael Fox: Following the Sandinistas’s defeat in the 1990 presidential election, President George H.W. Bush announced that the US was happy with the results, and that he would lift the embargo and provide $300 million in new economic aid for the country.
Nicaragua’s new president Violeta Chamorro rolled out a pro-US economic package.
William Robinson: So what that represented was that the new government would definitively do away with the Sandinista revolution but would also inaugurate the neoliberal structural adjustment — The restoration not just of full capitalism, but neoliberal capitalism in Nicaragua.
With that political triumph, it will privatize everything that had been public. It will not just politically restore the old oligarchy back to power, but economically restore the strength of the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie at a time when Nicaragua was going to integrate into these new circuits of global capitalism. And so that’s what this opposition and its triumph represented.
Michael Fox: But there was resistance, protests and strikes against the privatizations and austerity.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the Iran-Contra scandal trials languished.
In the trial against Oliver North, for instance, defense lawyers raised legal challenges over the release of classified information to hold up the trial and block the release of key information. The 14 charges against him were dropped down to a handful. He was eventually convicted of three counts, including aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry and ordering the destruction of documents. But those convictions were vacated by a DC court in 1990 and then dismissed the following year.
Ten more people were also convicted, including National Security Advisors John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane, and Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, who we heard about in the Honduras episode. Other top White House officials and members of the CIA and military were also convicted.
But almost all were pardoned by outgoing president George H.W. Bush in 1992. He also pardoned former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger before the case against him went to trial. You might remember that Bush ran the CIA in the 1970s before becoming Reagan’s vice president and eventually winning the presidency himself in 1988. During the Iran-Contra scandal, Bush said he had no knowledge of the dealings.
Lawrence Walsh [recording]: Weinberger’s notes contain evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan officials.
Michael Fox: Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, who led the investigation into the criminal conduct of the Reagan administration officials, responded to Bush’s pardon before the press.
Lawrence Walsh [recording]: President Bush’s pardon of Casper Weinberger and other Iran-Contra defendants undermines the principle that no man is above the law. The Iran-Contra coverup has continued for more than six years. It has now been completed with the pardon of Casper Weinberger.
Michael Fox: Alex Aviña.
Alex Aviña: There are a lot of controversial findings that should have resulted in more people being sent away, and the fact that it wasn’t allowed it to continue. So a lot of these things had never gone away.
Failure to actually prosecute this and find out what totally happened led to the reign of impunity and for it to become an even more systemic feature of US empire, particularly in the Global South.
Michael Fox: There was another lawsuit the United States ignored. Remember the CIA mining of the ports that I talked about in the start of today’s episode? Well, in the mid ‘80s, Nicaragua brought the United States to the International Court of Justice for violating international law by supporting the Contras and mining Nicaragua’s harbors. The ICJ is a branch of the United Nations, and it’s the only international court that adjudicates disputes between countries. So, it’s a big thing.
That was the court that later heard the high-profile genocide case against former Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milošević and…
Speaker 5: The case before the court is an opportunity to break this vicious cycle.
Michael Fox: More recently, it’s the court that’s heard the case of Nicaragua against Germany for failing to prevent genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
But back in 1986, the court ruled in favor of Nicaragua. It ruled that the US had violated international law, violated the sovereignty of Nicaragua, and used force against the country. It ordered the United States to make reparations to Nicaragua for all injury caused to the country. The United States just ignored it.
Alex Aviña.
Alex Aviña: They actually win the case, and what does the United States do? Well, they just say whatever. The International Court, they don’t have an army. They can’t do anything to us.
Michael Fox: This is not the first time nor the last that the United States would ignore international law.
There’s someone I met during my most recent trip to Nicaragua in early 2024 that really brought the full impact of the US Contra war home for me. His name is Jose Francisco Artola.
So I was near the border with Honduras, stopped for the night at a community recreation area. Jose was working as a janitor and the overnight guard. He was cleaning out the pool with one of those long nets. He wore a plaid shirt, boots unlaced, a warm smile.
What most struck me were his legs. He walked by kind of shuffling, limping from one to the other. his feet were turned inward. It’s called talipes equinovarus, or club foot. It’s a fairly common birth defect. About one in 1,000 babies in the United States have it. And although almost no one in my life knows this, I was one of those babies. I was born with clubfoot, too. Jose Francisco Artola could have been me.
The difference was I was born at a hospital in the United States — Northern Virginia, outskirts of DC. The doctors recognized the problem and took action. The solution isn’t really that hard if you act quick. My legs were put into little casts for a few months. Apparently, in more severe cases, patients may need additional casts, braces, or even surgery, but the birth defect is totally curable. Growing up, I played almost every sport there was. I run several days a week, when I have time. You would never guess I was born with clubfoot.
Jose did not have this opportunity because he was born in the late 1980s in a Nicaragua that was under the weight of a US-imposed economic and military war.
Jose says when he was born, he was sent home with his family and that was that. His father never took much of an interest in trying to find help for his legs. He says when he turned 18, he went to see a doctor, but at that point the doctor said there was nothing they could do. I was born in the most powerful country in the world, and he was born in the country that the United States was taking aim at.
And this is just one small example of the US policies on Nicaragua in the 1980s that continue to take a toll.
Ironically, Jose told me his dream today was to get to the United States. As I’ve mentioned throughout this series, that is the end result of US actions in Latin America, be it Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, or Venezuela, today. Driving generation after generation of migrants and refugees toward the very place that caused the bulk of the hardships in their countries — The United States.
I’ll be honest, I walked away from my conversation with Jose and had a hard time composing myself. Who gets to live and who gets to die? Who gets medical treatment and who doesn’t? Who gets to go in search of the so-called “American Dream”? None of it should depend on a roll of the dice for where you’re born, or the swipe of a pen in Washington.
Interestingly, if Jose were born in Nicaragua today, he would probably be able to get treatment. In 2012, the country rolled out a national program to provide care similar to what I got for kids born with clubfoot. And, in fact, there’ve been many improvements in Nicaragua over the years.
Before I arrived in Nicaragua last year, I wasn’t sure what to expect. News reports painted the image of a country in shambles. When I visited, it was my first time there in 20 years. And I’ll be honest, I was surprised. The highways are better paved and more developed than almost anywhere else in Mexico and Central America. Health care and education are still free.
Two decades ago when I was there, parts of the capital, Managua, were still rubble and dirt roads. Today, the whole waterfront and downtown has been completely revamped, with parks, museums, and a little waterpark that costs only a buck and a half to get in. Energy runs around the clock. That is not the way it was a couple of decades ago.
Coleen Littlejohn is an economist and solidarity activist who has lived and worked in Nicaragua since the 1980s.
Coleen Littlejohn: In 2006, there were 12-hour cuts in the energy every single day. It was really desperate.
Michael Fox: Not anymore. In the late 2000s, Coleen worked with the World Bank to bring in development projects like renewable energy.
Coleen Littlejohn: I remember bringing the vice president of the World Bank once. I think it must have been about 2007 or ‘08, to see the first wind tower. And it was on the ground, it hadn’t even been put up. I said it’s hard to show you a lot of things, but it’s happening. I said, you come back. And now there’s hundreds if not thousands. It’s like 15% of the total electricity in the country. We always talked in the ‘80s and in the Solidarity Movement about the threat of a good example.
Michael Fox: More than three-quarters of Nicaraguan energy today is from renewable sources.
See, the FSLN won again in 2006. Daniel Ortega has been in power since. That is the elephant in the room here. And I want to touch on this for a second because depending on who you speak with, Ortega’s government is either an authoritarian dictatorship or carrying on the revolutionary legacy of the Sandinistas.
And the reality is complicated. On the one hand, a substantial portion of the population is still as committed to the FSLN and Sandinismo as it’s ever been. That’s clear at concerts in Managua like this. Or on the streets, red and black Sandinista flags waving, people selling Che Guevara, Hugo Chavez, or Carlos Fonseca t-shirts. There’s this deep, visceral connection with the past and pride in the revolution. They point to those tremendous steps forward in terms of development that I’ve mentioned as accomplishments of the present.
But on the other hand, there have been government abuses, political prisoners, opposition candidates and civil society organizations silenced. Hundreds of anti-government activists, academics, and journalists have been forced into exile, citizenships stripped. For many, there’s an underlying sense of fear that they may be accused of being counterrevolutionaries.
Much of this stems from the violence of 2018. Some people call that a dictatorship crackdown on democracy. Others say it was an attempted US-backed coup. And the truth is there were huge peaceful protests. The government used excessive force, protesters were killed, and violent opposition groups held the country hostage. They used terror tactics and killed innocent people.
The fight over Nicaragua is vicious and it is complicated. And generally, onlookers abroad have lined up on one side or the other.
Grahame Russell: It’s so thick on so many levels.
Michael Fox: That’s Grahame Russell. You’ve heard from him before in this series. He’s been involved in Central America work since the 1980s. He’s the founder and director of the Canadian group Rights Action which supports local communities in Guatemala and Honduras, [who are] often facing mining and resource extraction on their lands. And I think he has a really good analysis about why progressives, solidarity activists, and academics are so divided over Nicaragua.
Grahame Russell: I think it’s actually been a very successful story of propaganda and demonization. And none of this is a defense of every single thing Ortega’s ever done or his wife or even the government itself. But it’s like a repetitive playbook.
Michael Fox: Grahame says there are many cases where we’ve seen divisions over countries in Latin America that are trying to step out from under the shadow of the United States: Cuba under Fidel, Venezuela under Chavez and now Maduro, Morales in Bolivia, Aristide in Haiti, and, of course, Ortega in Nicaragua.
Grahame Russell: These are the cases that create real fissures in the so-called more progressive sectors. I think the fault line is, is imperialism alive and well today? And does imperialism, colonialism, and settler colonialism characterize everything that’s going from the past? Does it characterize everything that’s going on today?
Michael Fox: This is important. This entire podcast looks at the history and legacy of US imperialism and intervention in the region.
Grahame’s point is this: can you see and criticize policies and actions of the Nicaraguan government today as disconnected from the 200 years of US intervention and the ongoing role of the United States? Or do you take into account all of that? This, for Grahame, is the guiding question. And I think that’s a helpful analysis.
Grahame Russell: This is not reducing all of Nicaragua’s ills to the US or Canada or the OAS or whatever. Not at all. It’s always a local to national to global issue. But in the measure that any North American government official, mainstream media, alternative media, donor, funder, whoever in the measure that we do not fundamentally address at all times what is the role of our governments, past and present?
What is the role of our companies, past and present? What is the role of the OAS, dominated by the US, past and present? What is the role of the World Bank, the Inter American Development Bank, past and present, dominated by the US?
In the measure that we do not address all of these at the same time that we’re throwing stones at Ortega individually or particular policies of his government, then we are participating in censorship. We are absolutely covering up our contribution to the role, to the issues, and it becomes morally and ethically really complicated because that’s our responsibility.
Michael Fox: Now, look, Grahame’s not trying to say that everything that happens in Nicaragua today is because of the United States. But he is saying that we can’t forget the United States. We can’t leave it out of the equation — Its role historically and its role today.
As I’ve mentioned so often in this podcast, the past is never far behind, particularly when that past caused so much harm, so much bloodshed, across the region. In Nicaragua, the legacy of the Contra War and the brutal US sanctions that destroyed the nation, well, they left wounds. Deep wounds, and they have an impact on the present and on current policies.
Grahame Russell: They do not want to be under the boot of the US. That, in my view, is their great crime. And it is absolutely independent of whether Ortega has committed this crime or not, whether he and his wife have scored extra money or not or stolen extra money or not. Because what’s going on in Nicaragua, as in Guatemala, as in Honduras, as in El Salvador, they should be assessed and judged on their government programs for the well-being of the majority of their populations.
And they’re all living under the shadow of the US. They’ve all been under the boot of the US. And that is a heavy boot.
Michael Fox: In the lead-up to the 2018 violence, the US funneled millions of dollars into opposition groups through USAID and the NED. US officials have consistently condemned Nicaragua, and they even blocked it from attending the Summit of the Americas in 2022.
Now, none of this compares to the US onslaught of the 1980s, but it shows that the United States hasn’t taken its finger off the trigger.
And here’s the thing. The US frames all of this as denouncing Nicaragua in the name of democracy and human rights. But the United States doesn’t really care about those things, as we’ve seen throughout this podcast. Remember Honduras, post-2009? We talked about it at length in episode 7. The US openly embraced fraudulent elections and a violent narco dictatorship and said nothing. Why? Because the leaders of the coup government were “open for business” Washington allies.
Meanwhile, the United States has levied sanctions on Nicaragua.
News Report 4: And welcome. Our top story at this hour, the United States has imposed an entry ban on Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, his vice president, wife, and his government.
Michael Fox: Now, this is not the crippling economic embargo of the 1980s. In fact, the US remains Nicaragua’s top trading partner. The sanctions are focused on top officials of the Ortega government, as well as gold companies — Nicaragua’s top export. But even the most minor sanctions are illegal in international law. And they have an impact. And some of this stuff has been rolled out in just the last couple of weeks.
Bills are even moving through Congress in Washington to try and remove the country from the Central American Free Trade Agreement, block loans, prohibit US investment in Nicaragua, and ban US imports of Nicaraguan beef and coffee.
Solidarity activists visited Capitol Hill in mid-May to ask their congressional representatives not to proceed with the bills.
Margaret Flowers: As people in the United States, we have a responsibility to stop our government from these retaliatory and illegal actions that it’s taking to try to harm the people, particularly the most vulnerable, of Nicaragua. It’s atrocious and we don’t support it.
Michael Fox: The timing of these steps in Washington is not by accident. They come in the wake of Nicaragua taking Germany to the International Court of Justice for aiding in genocide by continuing to supply weapons to Israel for its onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza.
Activist: Don’t punish the countries in the world that support Gaza.
Michael Fox: And speaking of Gaza…
You may have noticed there is this tremendous Palestine Solidarity Movement rippling over the United States and the world.
News Report 5: Across college campuses nation wide, another tense day, as more universities crack down on pro-Palestinian protests ahead of graduations.
Michael Fox: The pro-Palestine protests on college campuses in the United States have been compared to the anti-war movement of the 1960s. But there’s another forebear as well: Nicaragua solidarity. 1980s.
I asked Professor William Robinson about this when we spoke recently. He almost had to cancel our interview because of the actions taking place at his university, UC Santa Barbara.
Michael Fox: Literally, right now, there are occupations on your campus. Is Palestine, is this the Nicaragua of the 2020s?
William Robinson: You just hit the nail on the head. Thank you so much for bringing us there because right now worldwide the eyes are on Palestine. It’s the first genocide of the 21st century, and so much is at stake.
And the people of the world and us, both revolutionaries, but simply humanity, people that just love humanity and want to protect it, are saying this is the front line of the defense of humanity worldwide. Palestine right now is what Nicaragua was in the 1980s, is what Vietnam was in the 1960s. So much is at stake in the defense of Palestinian lives right now.
Michael Fox: So much.
That is all for this episode of Under the Shadow.
Next time, we head to Costa Rica…
…Because it was at this very site that the then-president symbolically knocked off a chip of the old barracks and he declared the end of the Costa Rican army, the military.
To a country without a standing army, to the attempts for peace in the region, and the US attempts to undermine the movement for change in Central America, even there.
That is next on Under the Shadow.
[Under the Shadow theme music]
Just a few things to say before I go.
First, I’ve added links to the National Security Archives, the documentary American Sandinista, Eline Van Ommen’s book, Nicaragua Must Survive, and other sources I’ve mentioned in this episode. You can find all this in the show notes.
Second, the new album for my band, Monte Perdido, is finally out on Spotify or wherever you stream music. It was just released a week ago. It’s called Ofrenda — Offering. We wrote it for our former guitarist, Pedro Benet, who died in a free diving accident in Mexico 10 years ago. It includes the theme songs to both Under the Shadow and my 2022 podcast, Brazil on Fire. The song you are hearing right now is the third song on the album, “Amanecer”. The link is also in the show notes. Please check it out, like it, follow it, and share with a friend.
Finally, if you like what you hear, please check out my Patreon page: patreon.com/mfox. I am constantly uploading exclusive music, photos, interviews, and background of these episodes. You can also support my work there, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America.
Under the Shadow is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.
The theme music is by my band, Monte Perdido.
This is Michael Fox. Many thanks.
See you next time…
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